The trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.
ALAN BENNETTOne recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.’ To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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There’s very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made.
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure.
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Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.
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My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn’t normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge.
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Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
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A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
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His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
ALAN BENNETT